What’s wrong with ‘angry, middle-aged white men’, Gary Neville?

Just when you thought we could all stop talking about flags, Gary Neville has arrived with his size ten boots to keep the ball in play. The ex-Man Utd footballer, turned property developer, said he removed a union flag from one of his Manchester sites because it was being ‘used in a negative fashion’. He also complained in a video message posted on social media that we’re being divided by ‘angry, middle-aged white men who know exactly what they’re doing’.

I’m surprised it took Neville so long to wade in on flags because he’s always seemed up for a scrap. As a player, he wore his heart on his sleeve, goading opposition fans and refusing to shake Peter Schmeichel’s hand after the Danish goalkeeper moved to rivals Manchester City. A Dutch team-mate, Jaap Stam, later described Neville and his brother Phil as ‘busy c**ts’ whom he accused of always ‘grumbling about everything in general and nothing in particular’, adding that ‘the pair of them never stop whingeing’.

As a man with a view on everything, no wonder that Neville has piped up on the current trend of flying the union flag. But he might have bitten off more than he can chew on this topic. Some football fans are threatening to cancel their Sky Sports subscriptions unless the broadcaster gives him the boot, and we’ve seen how these boycott campaigns can snowball on social media. The irony of it all is that Neville has more in common with the people he is criticising than he realises. After all, he, too, is an angry, middle-aged white man.

I interviewed both Nevilles several times during their playing days and Gary always came across as a trade union foreman at heart. Most players relied on their agents to keep interviewers in line. Not Gary. Neville thought nothing of firmly laying down the ground rules himself, jabbing a finger at me the moment he arrived. Once he’d set out his wishes, he was usually open and charming, but I found his company intense and restless. I felt tired afterwards.

Since his playing days, he’s often signed off his tweets with the slogan ‘attack the day’ and he’s lived up to the sentiment, proving that he is indeed very ‘busy’, if not necessarily a ‘c**t’. He’s had a disappointing stab at coaching, bought a small football club, opened hotels, launched a higher education institute, and made guest appearances on Dragon’s Den, where he invested in a number of companies. Meanwhile, he’s been a successful and feisty football pundit, frequently making waves with controversial remarks.

But when it’s come to politics, Neville has had less success. He endorsed Labour at the 2019 general election, joined the party in 2022 and appeared in an election broadcast during the 2024 general election campaign. But he criticised Labour when it abstained in a vote on Covid restrictions. ‘You’re the opposition, don’t sit in the stand,’ he told fence-sitting MPs. This year, he attacked the Labour government for the National Insurance rise, saying he didn’t think companies and small businesses ‘should be deterred from employing people’. Does Neville regret cheering for Keir Starmer last summer?

Some on the left haven’t been too sure about a multimillionaire property developer being seen as one of their own. Asked to clarify his position, he said: ‘I’m not a socialist, I’m a capitalist’. Neville added that he believes in ‘entrepreneurialism’, in ‘companies making profit’, but also ‘lower taxes’ and a ‘distribution of profit’ that is ‘spread amongst us’.

He was accused of hypocrisy when he signed up to work as a pundit at the World Cup in Qatar, which has an awful human rights record. Pulled up on this by Ian Hislop on Have I Got News For You, Neville promised he would use his platform at the tournament to ‘challenge’ the Qatari authorities. He duly called Qatari working conditions ‘abhorrent’ during ITV’s coverage of the World Cup final and accused UK ministers of ‘demonising’ rail workers and nurses, prompting 705 complaints to Ofcom. Perhaps Neville should stick to talking about football.